Chi-Yun Shin, The Art of Branding: Tartan “Asia Extreme” Films
“Asia Extreme” is the first label created to specifically distribute East Asian film titles by
London-based Tartan Films, which operated as Metro-Tartan Distribution between 1992 and
2003, before reverting back to the name Tartan Films.
Starting off as a cult phenomenon, targeting the cult “fan-boys” but soon incorporating the art-
house audiences (or world cinema patrons) to its niche, the Tartan Asia Extreme label has
established itself as an immediately recognizable brand.
Tartan “found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
[by identifying] ‘the next big thing’ ahead of your competitors and becoming the early dominant
provider.
Questions, however, have been raised as to the reductive nature of Tartan’s marketing practices, which repackages the films “as exotic and dangerous cinematic thrills.” In addition, the output of the label, and the name of the label itself, invoke and (p.87) in part rely on the Western audiences’ perception of the East as weird and wonderful, sublime and grotesque.
Edward Said
“Asia Extreme” provides a fascinating site to explore how the West consumes East Asian cinema.
Raison d’être: when Nakata Hideo’s Ring and Miike Takashi’s Audition were unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences nationwide, it became apparent that the appetite for such outrageous fare was massive and it made sense to let people know where to find it.
For instance, Peter Bradshaw, who seems to be quite shaken up by the film, wrote for the Guardian that Oldboy “open[ed] up a whole new sick frontier of exotic horror” and ends the
review by declaring “this is cinema that holds an edge of cold steel against your throat.”27 For Harry Knowles of the Ain’t ItCool News, Oldboy is “an engaging, flawless film that successfully pushes all (p.96) the right buttons,” and its director Park is aFigure 5.9 Audition poster image (Courtesyof Tartan Films)genius and “the films coming from Koreaare exceptional” and “light years betterthan any contemporary set film in the US this year or…for many years.”
Oldboy also attracted no less critical condemnation. As Grady Hendrix puts it, the film “became a critical scratching post for even the most timid magazine writers, who fired off all the insults
they’d been saving for a rainy day. “31 Most noteworthy came from New York-based newspapers. Introducing the film as “the frenzied Korean thriller,” Manohla Dargis commented in the New
York Times: “The fact that Oldboy is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt,
reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it’s all good) and
finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys. “32 Rex Reed at the New York Observer asserted that the film is “sewage” and sarcastically questioned: “What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mix of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?” Reed’s hostile and rather reductive response sparked many online
it seems that the success of Tartan Asia Extreme reveals more about Western perceptions and obsessions about East Asian countries than what people or societies are like in these countries.
Just as the West “discovered” Japanese masters in the films of Kurosawa, Mizuguchi Kenji, and Ozu Yasujiro, with the Tartan Asia Extreme label, the world of film in the West “discovered” new master directors, notably Kim Kiduk, Miike Takashi, and Park Chan-wook.
For instance, Tartan Films’ owner McAlpine has referred the label to be a “brand [and] — a genre in itself,”